Thursday, April 14, 2011

As America commemorates the sesquicentennial of its Civil War, we at MKI are poring over the materials in our collections to illuminate how the events of this era were documented by German speakers in America and in Europe. The following comes from the Geschichte des Tages (Events of the Day) section of the August 4, 1855 Illustrirte Abend-Schule, published in Buffalo, New York. While still several years before the outbreak of armed conflict, this summary of the mood in German America is telling:America: Party politics, temperance litigation, murders, railroad and steamship disasters – and that's it.

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25 Years or 325 Years

The Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MKI) turned 25 years old in October of 2008. Sounds like a long time, but not much compared to the fact that the first German settlement in North America (Germantown, Pennsylvania) was established some 325 years ago.

We've started this blog as a way to showcase some of the work we're doing. We also see it as an opportunity to examine the influence immigrants have had on America—-after all, except for the indigenous people of the Americas, we're all of immigrant stock here.

We'll post some ideas that are running through our heads these days; we hope you'll find them of interest and will feel like offering your own comments.